HENRY KINGSLEY THE NOVELIST.
it HENRY KINGSLEY was only one of the "might have beens," and his early death leaves no perceptible blank in English literature ; but the "might have been" in him was so
very good, that we are unwilling to let him pass away as one of the mere crowd, unnoticed and unregarded. A brother of the la to Charles Kingsley, he had all the powers which in this gener- ation have marked that family, and much of the genius of its best-known member. He .went out early to Australia, and re- turning published a story, based partly upon his colonial experi- enee; which made good critics hope that another and a great novelist would shortly attract the world. " Geoffry Hamlyn " never achieved the popularity of Charles Kingsley's novels, and is well known even now to a comparatively limited circle, but none of the earlier tales of the Rector of Eversley were superior to it in promise. It is full of power of the most varied and dif- ferent kinds, descriptive, analytical, and humorous. We do not 17naw in the literature of fiction a complex character better de- scribed or more thoroughly analysed than the heroine, Mary Thornton, the Vicar's daughter, who, as her father regretfully says, "is not a lady," but a passionate village girl, with a tropi- cal nature, an unregulated brain, and all the instincts of a born actress of the lower type. The portrait of this girl, with her fierce, yet not hateful egoism ; her capacity of mixing real emotion and histrionic abandon ; her rude and, so to speak, animal, yet true affection for lover, husband, son, and friends ; her lawless wilfulness, and her latent capability alike of a goodness to which she never reaches, her nature being too vulgar, and a criminality to which she never falls, her training and circumstances being too favourable, is a work of the highest art, and showed in Henry Kingsley not only unusual power of observation, but power of description of a severely restrained kind, such as is given only to the masters of fiction. With every temptation to daub, there is no daubing. On the contrary, the touches by which the character is brought out are only too few, and seem so unconscious, that we should doubt whether Mr. Kingsley was at all aware that the figure of Mary Thornton was the best work he ever did in life. Ile himself probably delighted far more in the remainder of his work, in his descriptions of Gippsland scenery, some of which are equal to -the best of his brother's revellings in tropical nature ; in his slighter, but life-like sketches, as of Dr. Mulhaus, the genial, over- informed, peppery Prussian ; of Captain Saxon, the kindly billiard- sharper; of Major Buckley, the large-built, fine-natured, and slightly heavy soldier ; of Gipsy Madge, and her repulsive paramour ; of old Miss Thornton, the beautiful old maid ; and of Bill Lee, the faith- ful convict; in the rattling cleverness and naturalness of his dia- logue, and in his power of raising his reader to enthusiasm by depicting the operation of a great impulse or emotion in some wild or brutal nature. No one, except perhaps Bret Harte, ever possessed this faculty in a higher degree than Henry Kingsley. He had an intellectual sympathy with human brutes, comprehended their temptations, and delighted in showing them redeemed for the moment by some movement of the better will. We doubt if there is a more powerful scene in the literature of fiction than that in " Ravenshoe,"in which Lord Ascot, the brutal, indeed criminal turf- man, stained with every vice, and even in the moment of his exalta- tion ready to commit a murder, sees fortune—vast, dreamy fortune —before him, at the price of a treachery which is much smaller than many he has committed—it is merely to conceal an address—which his wife passionately urges him to commit, but which some tug of old affection at his heart-string's forbids him to perform. "There are things, you know, a fellow can't do." Thackeray would have been proud of Lord Ascot, and justly, for very fee' could have described that grand effort of the brutal sportsman to rise above himself, and yet have shown him afterwards still unchanged in all external things, still a human brute, but purified up to the degree such a nature would bear without a religious transformation, by the self-sacrifice, and subsequent misfor- tune. This second novel, " Ravenshoe," seems to many the best work Mr. Kingsley ever did, and it is, no doubt, full of interest and observation and wit. The plot, though com - PE °Mod, is excellent, and there are, at least, three eharacters, —the Lord Ascot, just mentioned ; Lord Saltire, the cool, cynical roue of the Regency, with his brain still intact, and a trace of human kindness in his withered old heart ; and Cuthbert Ravenshoe, the Catholic aseetie and country gentleman, with his high personal pride, and keen family affection, and diseased conscience, which will live for life in the memory of all who have comprehended them. Mr. Kingsley's original talent for plot-making, too, extended to individual scenes, and " Ravenshoe " contains a dozen which might be placed upon the stage in a high comedy almost unaltered. The "go" and spirit of the book are delightful, and sustained with a vigour to which Charles Kingsley, though a man of far higher genius, could never attain. Even in this second novel, however, judicious critics missed something of the special power they had hoped Henry Kingsley would ultimately display. There was plenty of wit, plenty of "go," plenty of dramatic situation, but another and higher intellectual quality had almost disappeared. There is here and there in " Geoffry Hamlyn" a trace of play- ful, observant humour of a very rare and peculiar kind, a humour full of fancy, but penetrated and, as it were, warmed by kind- liness and sympathy with created things, which is most attractive, and which, had it remained a special note of Mr. Kingsley's writings, would have produced that rare result,—a love in absent readers for the invisible author. We can imagine nothing better of its kind, or more calculated to raise a presumption in favour of its author's personality, than this delicious bit of description, in which a man like the author of "Rah and his Friends" might be supposed to be pouring out his very best :—
"What a delicious verandah is this to dream in! Through the tangled passion-flowers, jessamines, and magnolias, what a soft gleam of bright, hazy distance, over the plains and far away! The deep river- glen cleaves the table-land, which, here and there, swells into breezy downs. Beyond, miles away to the north, is a great forest-barrier, above which there is a blaze of late snow, sending strange light aloft into the burning haze, All this is seen through an arch in the dark mass of verdure which clothes the trellis-work, only broken through in this one place, as though to make a frame for the picture. He leans back, and gives himself up to watching trifles. See here. A magpie comes furtively out of the house with a key in his mouth, and seeing Sam, stops to consider if he is likely to betray him. On the whole, he thinks not ; so he hides the key in a crevice, and whistles a tune. Now enters a cockatoo, waddling along comfortably and talking to himself. He tries to enter into conversation with the magpie, who, however, cuts him dead, and walks off to look at the prospect. Flop! flop A great foolish-looking kangaroo comes through the house and peers round him. The cockatoo addresses a few remarks to him, which he takes no notice of, but goes blundering out into the garden, right over the contempla- tive magpie, who gives him two or three indignant pecks on his clumsy feet, and sends him flying down the gravel walk. Two bright-eyed little kangaroo rats come out of their box peering and blinking. The cockatoo finds an audience in them, for they sit listening to him, now and then catching a flea, or rubbing the backs of their heads with their fore-paws. But a buck 'possum, who stealthily descends by a pillar from unknown realms of mischief on the top of the house, evidently dis- credits cockefe stories, and departs down the garden;to see if he can find something to eat. An old cat comes up the garden-walk, accom- panied by a wicked kitten who ambushes round the corner of the flower-bed, and pounces out on her mother, knocking her down and severely maltreating her. But the old lady picks herself up without a murmur, and comes into the verandah followed by her unnatural off- spring, ready for any mischief. The kangaroo rats retire into their box, and the cockatoo, rather nervous, lays herself out to be agreeable. But the puppy, born under an unlucky star, who has been watching all these things from behind his mother, thinks at last, 'Here is some one to play with,' so he comes staggering forth and challenges the kitten to a lark. She receives him with every symptom of disgust and abhor- rence; but he, regardless of all spitting and tail-swelling, rolls her over, spurring and swearing, and makes believe he will worry her to death. Her scratching and biting tell but little on his woolly hide, and he seems to have the best of it out and out, till a new ally appears un- expectedly, and quite turns the tables. The magpie hops up, ranges alongside of the combatants, and catches the puppy such s dig over the tail as sends him howling to his mother with a flea in his ear."
There is a passage in "Austin Elliott," describing a quarrel among some children, written in this spirit, but with that ex- ception we do not know another in Henry Kingsley's writings, or one in which the fun does not degenerate into absurdity. "Raven- shoe," however; though lacking this quality, is an almost perfect novel. "Austin Elliott" is touching, especially in its later chap- ters; and though the plot is hopelessly bewildering, and many of the best passages mere repetitions, the charm of " Geoff-7 Ham- lyn " and "Ravenshoe " is visible in "The Hillyars and the Bur- tons," that strange series of powerful, though somehow discon- nected scenes, one of which—the wander of the crazy beauty, Gerty Hillyar, through the Australian bush—is full of a ghastly pathos ; while another, the trouble of the Calvinist Cornish miner, who has found a copper-mine in Australia, and is driven by his fears lest he should be outbid at a sale of the land into a fit of religious mania, is one of the most weirdly eccentric and powerful that the author ever drew. From the publication of this hook, hevrever, Henry Kingsley accomplished nothing worthy of his genius. We know little of his personal history, but we imagine, from the few notices we have seen of it, that he was one of those men on whom any pecuniary necessity for writing acted as a bewilder- ing spell, depriving him of spontaneity and driving him back upon his memory, and therefore upon resources already used up. His humour degenerated into rollicking absurdity, his perception of character grew fitful, and his plots, never very pro- bable, except in " Geoffry Hamlyn," which has, indeed, no more plot than any other family history, became complicated with im- possible or preposterous incidents, until the public grew wearied, and the present writer is probably the only man who ever followed his pen through a descending series of works steadily to the end, and felt rewarded for a toilsome effort by A few pages in which he detected the old power of charm. The story called the Sikotes," for example, is, as a story, nonsense, and the incidents -almost grotesque in their improbability ; but there are bits in it, like the sketch of old Betts, the grateful vulgarian, and of Arthur Sikote, the hard, vain, self-believing, but most able University tutor, which no one but Henry Kingsley could have produced. The last story, "The Grange Garden," though praised in many papers, from a commendable feeling for its author, then lying slowly dying of one of the most terrible of human afflictions, is to any one who had admired him for years a most painful book. It retains the old flavour, is full of the old expressions, and is pene- trated by the old kindliness ; but the plot has become nonsense, the descriptions have lost their reality, the epigrams are poor in all but form, the insight into character has disappeared, and the fun is almost ghastly- in its ineffectiveness. The long and painful period of struggle, during which he had for some time been editor of a Scottish semi-religious paper, a position for which he had no natural fitness, must have worn him out, and of all his later books, only one, "Hefty "—a strange, disjointed, improbable, but most powerful description of characters ruled by the Missionary spirit—deserves in the least to live. His earlier works should. however, survive, and keep alive the memory of one who, if -literary work be any test of character, must have been essentially • a very noble fellow, full of all manner of manliness, deeply loving the active virtues, and penetrated to his heart's core with sym- pathy for mental suffering. Henry Kingsley did not reach his brother's level, and in his works teaches the Stoic rather than the -Christian philosophy, but no one can read his books without feeling that his love for his kind has increased, that his fortitude has been strengthened, and that he has been encouraged by no mean help to prefer before all things in life to do the work God has given, him to perform. He never wrote a book with a moral, and never drew a character far above the average, but a brisk and -clear north wind of sentiment—sentiment that braces instead of enervating—blows through all his works, and makes all their readers at once healthier and more glad.
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